“Consensus” and “Dialogue”

Tools for a Digital Democracy

The Problem

• Our government was created with papers and pens
• Tooling limits the capabilities of what we create
• We have better tools now so we should create a better democracy

With New Technologies Come New Opportunities

• Digital communications can represent more than just “yes” and “no”
• Digital communications can be collected near instantaneously
• Digital communications can be quickly collated and summarized

CONSENSUS

CONSENSUS

• An application which can collect an opinion on a presented topic as an arbitrary number and also accepts user submitted URLs
• Simple interface, a select list and just two primary inputs

Does this replace the normal vote?

NO

How does consensus resist gaming?

• Every application installation has a trust level associated with it
• Trust can be raised by government institutions and government trusted 3rd parties
• Identity is assured with cryptographic fingerprinting and public key cryptography

Is that enough? No, there is more.

• Opinion history is stored as a cryptographically secure Merkel tree (think block chain)
• Your history can be shared with other trusted users of Consensus
• Restoration of you opinion history can be propagated throughout the network
• Depending on the device to which Consensus is installed additional identity features can be enabled (also raising trust)

Seems like there will need to be more protections.

• An active part of the project would focus on anti-gaming and security
• A blacklist database would be made and a narrow AI plugged in to analyze and adapt
• The opinion delivery packet can be extended with additional identity information and uniqueness tokens
• Symmetric encryption would augment public key exchange

So how does this work with government?

• Representatives, parties or other groups would set consensus topics
• Representatives could then act with greater strength when consensus is behind them, or explain when it is not
• The constituency would have a clear record of how much their elected official follows consensus

Consensus Development

• Reuse open source first approach
• Agile using the Kan Ban technique
• Built towards an open API
• Forks welcome and encouraged
• Combination of public funds, private funds and volunteer work

How do we get this implemented?

• We use it first
• Once it’s working we petition our representatives to start using it
• Reach out to all other political parties about using it
• Collect and analyze the data to show validity of the application
• Make it a functional centerpiece of the party

Dialogue

Decision making problems

• The argumentative process to justify political action is based on antiquated technologies
• Government argument is not open to the people
• Well understood biases and cognitive errors are not corrected or highlighted
• Decision making is not augmented with argument analysis

Quantification of Natural Language Debate

• Use current natural language processing and machine learning
• Inject structured metadata which can be acted on independently
• Automatically create and curate discussion trees from numerous sources

Structural Visualization of Decision Trees

• Decision trees are rendered as SVG structures
• Tree structure components are automatically enhanced with metadata
• Meta data dictionaries are flexible

Distributed Impact Analysis

• Omnichannel integration creates argumentative structure from numerous sources
• Synonym system built to work far beyond individual word matches
• Automatic assembly of large argumentative data sets

Cognitive Bias Mapping

• Identification of potential biases by adaptive rubrics
• Cognitive biases in conversation would be rated granularly
• Fully versioned de-biasing for historical analysis

Tied into the Consensus App

• Nodes can anchor into consensus points
• Consensus values can be stored in node or branch metadata
• Consensus vs primary actor values can create forks when they differ enough

Questions?